


could we dim the sun and wonder where we've been?

by brutalhustler



Series: 30x31 [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 06:14:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9222740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutalhustler/pseuds/brutalhustler
Summary: An alternate timeline in which Mulder and Scully leave the FBI and decide to find the truth on their own time. It goes more or less as you would expect.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Day 2 prompt: Use the line "I've never thought about it that way before." 
> 
> An important note: in lieu of research I googled "natural gas leaks" and then immediately got bored and exited out of the page so please suspend some disbelief

It’s their second year of this. Whatever this is. 

She’s agreed to drive; a decision she regrets the second Mulder drifts off to sleep in the passenger seat, leaving her with the open road and a steering wheel still cold to the touch. 

She didn’t think the west coast was supposed to get cold during the winter, or at least that’s what the mainstream media has taught her. But here she is, in a station wagon, driving through Oregon and shivering while the heater struggles to do its job. 

There’s been chatter of lost time and strange lights in the night sky near the California-Mexico border so they’re moving again, what little they have packed into the back of the car. Scully had hoped that their small rental home in Oregon would’ve been home for a little while longer. It wasn’t the best place they’d ever been but it was nice _and_ cheap and staying in one place for longer than four months is somewhat of a luxury to New Scully. 

The lukewarm air pumping from the heater warms her chilly hands and feet, but makes everything else feel colder than it should. Mulder snorts a bit in his sleep and burrows his face into the window, the seatbelt biting into his face in what looks like an uncomfortable manner. 

-

After two days of driving (and a truly horrible night in their car at a rest stop outside of San Francisco) they’ve reached their destination. A small town twenty miles north of the border. A small, hot, dusty red town. She hates it. 

They check into a motel until they can find some (slightly) more permanent lodging and Mulder spends upwards of half an hour chatting with the woman at the front desk about her recent alien abduction. He loves it. 

\- 

Three weeks later they’ve learned that there’s a natural gas deposit that’s been leaking for the past few months, causing the weird lights and the accounts of lost time. Scully is disappointed, Mulder is more disappointed, and they pack up their things for the fourth time this year. 

-

It’s a rapidly de-aging man in Philly (a baby by the time they reach him- Scully is certain it was a baby all along, Mulder is less so), a dog in Tampa that can tell the future, a woman with a bigfoot colony living in her backyard in Spokane, a handful of plain old alien abductions, scattered across the United States. 

It’s seven months, two weeks, three days. 

It’s eighty-one showers, three hundred cups of coffee, twelve all-nighters. 

It’s a god damn headache each and every morning.

-

“But it’s what we do,” Mulder says, and even though they’re lying face to face in bed his face is unreadable in the dark. 

They’ve had this conversation before, approximately twice a year since they left the bureau. 

“But what if it’s not… what we do? I’m tired, Mulder,” Scully says, “I’m tired of finding strange new medical conditions and listening to the hallucinations of strangers and practically everything under the sun except actual aliens.”

“But-“

“I know that this is what you love, Mulder. I know that you believe and you want me to believe but it’s been two years and the only thing I believe is that I don’t want this anymore.”

“Then why are you still here?” He asks, voice rough.

“Because I believe in _you,_ Mulder. You have to know that. But is this really the way you want to live?”

“Let’s say we do stop and settle down. What if we don’t make sense outside of all of this? If just being us isn’t enough?” 

She says, “Mulder, I am here for you in any and every way that you need me to be. I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth and back. But sometimes I wish you would follow me for a change.” 

He takes a deep breath-

-lets it out.

He says, “I guess I’ve never thought about it like that before.”

-

They end up back in Oregon. 

It’s five years, seven months, three days, and counting. 

It’s a puppy (and later, a dog) jumping on their legs every morning, a woodpecker pecking at the weather vane, four summertime harvests from their garden, and their daughter, playing and laughing in the backyard. 

It’s more than enough. 


End file.
